Political Internet Marketing Advice for Presidential Candidates

Internet Marketing in the Philippines is technically still at it’s infancy and this is reflected by a lot of the online campaigns being done by politicians running in the 2010 elections. It’s actually quite interesting to see what they come up with but most of the time they’re really not maximizing the potential of the net and social media. There is so much more they can do and quite frankly right now almost all of them have contained internet marketing to one box: paramihan ng Facebook friends.

Here are 3 tips that I just wanted to share for the campaign teams:

1. If you’re on Facebook might as well go all out
Here’s the funny thing that I’ve noticed. Online advertising done by a lot of politicians go to their Facebook profile. However if you check their official pages it’s rarely updated with media. Most of the time they just post press statements. All the other content in the page is static and rarely gets refreshed. However, the latest media material that they have is posted on their main site (which never gets promoted as much as their Facebook profile).

For example, the Manny Villar page does get regular status updates but the videos and pictures are still old. The video there is still the old “Akala Mo” commercial and we all know by now that Villar has released over a dozen kinds of materials for TV.

Don’t treat social media as a one-way conversation. It should always be two-way. Try to use it to get feedback from the community. Come up with campaigns that will ask your followers to collaborate and to talk about you in their respective networks. Again, let me repeat – SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT A PRESS RELEASE CENTER. It’s a way for you to mobilize so that you can evangelize.

2. Drop the Flash Sites
This was one of my biggest concerns for Chiz Escudero’s sites when he was still in the running for the Presidency. Yes, flash makes your websites look nice but it brings in tons of negative effects. First flash-based sites don’t do well with Search Engine Optimization. The most glaring and obvious problem though is that it takes a while to load. Yes, it will load fast in your office because your internet is probably fast. However 80% of Filipinos access the internet in cafes. These cafes have a 1MBPS connection shared by 20 users.

To prove my point, let me post a screenshot of what the Gibo website looks when I tried accessing it in an internet cafe in Makati. Note that this is already after more than 10 seconds:

Yes it looks cool. But it’s not really useful if people don’t get to see it right? Since this is still Beta, I hope the campaign staff of Gibo seriously takes a look into this because personally I find this to be an utter waste of money on their end. Especially if they’ll drive traffic to this site using online advertising.

Here’s a very important and basic marketing rule that a lot of internet marketers always fail to follow: It’s not about what your agency thinks or what you think. It’s about the consumer. The same principle applies to websites.

3. Communicate your main message in the first 3 seconds
There are various studies saying that users will only spend 3-4 seconds in a site before they decide to stay or leave. This is very important because it means that you only have less than 5 seconds to tell the visitor what your product is all about and what you want him to do. The best way to do this is to make sure of the following:

1. Your site loads fast.
2. Use images to grab attention. Not too many though because that will clutter the site.
3. Big, bold, easy-to-read text for the main message.

From the current roster of sites I’d have to say that it’s a statistical tie again between Senator Noynoy Aquino and Senator Manny Villar when it comes to following these rules.

Noynoy’s site is very well designed. The main image is strong and actually compliments his current ad campaign with the torches. What I personally like about this site is that it loads pretty fast and it clearly communicates to the user what Noynoy is about and what you should click next (Support/Donate). It’s also nice to see that they came up with their own fund raising activity, hahaha.

Manny Villar’s site is also done pretty nicely. Here the emphasis is the volunteer form. A nice addition though is the news ticker that they’ve added at the upper right side which talks about the latest issues that Villar is facing. It sucks to be on the defensive but he really has to defend these things. However a better way of doing this would just to make a completely new site with the proper search engine tags for the issue and drive all related traffic there. This is important because most of the users will get their information about C5 via Google searches. If you type “C5 Villar” this is what will come out:

Not really a good defense right?

All the other candidates need to play catch up when it comes to their internet marketing strategies. Nick Perlas’ site has a lot of information but personally I find it too cluttered to read. The site is too busy to the point that it’s just sensory overload for a visitor. You don’t have a clear idea in once glance on how Nick Perlas is and what you should click.

Here’s another problem with Nick Perlas – his real site is not properly optimized for the search engines. If you type “Nick Perlas” on Google, the first hit is actually a fan site. The real site is several scroll downs below. The bad thing here is the fan site is poorly done and it even has Google ads which advertises Manny Villar.

Brother Eddie’s site, on the other hand, is just so busy with all of the elements loading left and right. It looks like a hodge-podge of information which confused me. I haven’t seen Erap Estrada’s site yet and I tried searching for it on Google but I didn’t get any hits. Dick Gordon’s site is also nice to look at. It’s very organized but I’m not really a fan of the wall of text. The political campaign site should not be a blog because you really can’t expect visitors to read all the articles there. It’s wasted space.

Anyway, that’s about it for this entry. Again, let me just reiterate that Internet Marketing in the Philippines should go beyond having the most number of friends. Political candidates can quickly gain search engine exposure with premium linkbuilding services. There are so many creative and innovative ways to do social media marketing. If you’re agency can’t come up with something than “add friend” campaigns, then you might need to consider getting new ones.